Standard Chartered has initiated coverage of Morpho with a $60 price target for end-2030, arguing that its DeFi lending and onchain infrastructure segments are well positioned to benefit from the growth of tokenized assets.
The bank described Morpho as a dual-use DeFi protocol, combining a lending marketplace with infrastructure aimed at onchain banks and institutional asset managers.
It set a $60 end-2030 target for MORPHO, implying roughly 33x upside from current levels and suggesting potential outperformance versus bitcoin (BTC) and ether (ETH) over the same period.
At the time of publication, MORPHO was trading up more than 13% on the day at around $2.13.
“Given its status as one of the largest DeFi lending protocols and its comfortable financial position (it just raised $175 million in VC funding), we think Morpho can scale to meet the expanding base of assets deployed in DeFi,” wrote Geoff Kendrick, head of digital assets research at Standard Chartered, in a Wednesday report.
DeFi has strengthened over the past year, supported by growing institutional interest in tokenized real-world assets and expanding onchain lending activity. Rising stablecoin adoption and renewed demand for crypto credit have further supported lending protocols, while infrastructure providers enabling institutional capital deployment onchain have emerged as one of the fastest-growing areas of the sector.
Kendrick said Morpho operates across two core businesses: Morpho Markets, a lending protocol that has grown to about one-quarter the size of Aave by deposits, and Morpho Vaults, which provides infrastructure for onchain asset management and banking applications.
He added that this structure positions Morpho to capture growth as DeFi moves beyond crypto-native lending toward institutional-grade and tokenized asset markets.
Standard Chartered expects assets on Morpho to scale broadly in line with its forecast for a 37-fold expansion in total DeFi assets by 2030, supported by the protocol’s strengthened balance sheet following its $175 million fundraising round.
The bank noted that Morpho’s long-term trajectory will depend on the success of its Vaults business in attracting institutional capital and traditional financial assets onchain. While integration with traditional finance may be complex, it also represents a major opportunity as tokenization accelerates.
